How to avoid abandoned carts in e-commerce?

Abandoned carts are a frequent problem in e-commerce, depriving you of part of your sales. Find out how to reduce them with our tips.

What are abandoned carts?

This is it. Your acquisition strategy is well under way. One of your future customers arrives on your e-commerce site or the marketplace of your choice. He discovers your products, browses the product sheets you've carefully created. Finally, they add an item to their shopping cart, get ready to finalize their order and... leave the site. End of story.

You've just experienced an abandoned cart, when one of your buyers leaves the site before finalizing his order. Abandoned carts can occur at several stages of the purchasing process:

• Even before accessing the shopping cart, when the user has added a product to the cart but leaves the site;
• When choosing delivery options, because the costs are too high for the customer or the delivery methods unsuitable;
• At checkout, because the customer wishes to use a specific payment method or compare prices again.

Abandoned cart = wasted efforts

Abandoned carts are a direct loss for your brand. You've gone to great lengths to get users to add your products to their shopping baskets: marketing and acquisition strategy, pricing strategy, shopping funnel optimization... It's a shame if this investment is lost at the last stage of your customer journey.

Rest assured, abandoned carts are inevitable in e-commerce. E-buyers are constantly stimulated, and these distractions can divert them from their purchases.

Fortunately, you can limit abandonment. There are 8 tips you can put in place today:

8 tips to reduce abandoned carts in e-commerce

A functional, responsive site

If you sell on a marketplace, this should not be a problem. Your marketplace takes care of the technical side of things, ensuring that your site is fast and functional. At Rakuten, for example, our dedicated teams make sure that the site runs smoothly, and regularly add new features to constantly improve our customers' experience.

If, on the other hand, you have your own e-commerce site, you need to ensure its quality. Check the following points in particular:

• Page-loading speed: if your site takes too long to load, your customers may be put off. To speed up loading, consider reducing the size of images and optimizing the source code of your pages.
• Visual clarity: overloading your web pages and product sheets with information is a bad idea. Your customers need to understand quickly where to click to perform their actions. Add margins, prioritize information and pay attention to the overall aesthetics of your pages.
• Up-to-date visuals: make sure your graphics are up to date and consistent with your brand.
• Responsive website: 62% of online purchases are made from a cell phone, and 47% of e-buyers use different screen formats (source: Fevad 2024). Your e-commerce site must therefore be optimized for mobile phones. Think about adjusting font sizes, margins, etc.

A fast, intuitive customer journey

The fluidity of your purchasing path is essential for your customers to finalize their order, as well as being a decisive factor in your customer satisfaction. Add guidance to your pages, maintain visual consistency and, above all, prioritize information. Every step of the journey should have the same objective: to help customers complete their order.

A fast customer journey also maximizes your chances of retaining customers to the end. Count the number of steps between the moment a user selects a product and the moment the order is finalized. Then analyze each of these steps and eliminate any unnecessary ones. For example, do your customers really need to create an account to order?

Then analyze the distractions on each page or step, and try to reduce them. For example, are recommendations for additional items always relevant, or do they tend to distract users from their purchase?

Attractive, transparent delivery costs

Nearly 70% of customers abandon their shopping baskets because delivery charges are too high (source: Baymard Institute 2023). To keep as many buyers as possible on track, you need to offer attractive delivery charges.

To calculate your delivery costs, keep in mind your various costs (packaging, shipping, returns, etc.) and consider your margins. The aim is not to lose profitability. Analyzing the charges offered by your competitors is also a good way of positioning yourself.

If your margins allow it, you can also opt for free delivery. This method has the advantage of increasing your customers' average basket and helping to build loyalty. On the other hand, it reduces your sales margins and is therefore not suitable for all situations.

Whatever delivery charges you choose, you owe it to your customers to be transparent. Offer simple, easy-to-understand grids, for example, by grouping items into weight categories.

Choice of delivery method

For 88% of e-buyers, e-commerce is synonymous with saving time (Fevad 2024). Your customers need to be able to receive their product as close to them as possible, and at the right time to suit their needs.

While home delivery remains the preferred mode of delivery for 77% of e-buyers (Fevad 2024), 71% also opt for collection from a relay point and 25% for click and collect.

If you can, consider offering your customers several different delivery solutions. You should also make sure that your advertised delivery times are not too long. Consumers are more likely to validate their basket if they receive their parcel the next day than if they have to wait a week.

Several payment methods

Flexible payment options are another important parameter to ensure that your customers complete their order. In fact, 37% of e-buyers in 2023 used an electronic payment solution, 27% an instant transfer, 29% a gift card or gift voucher and 28% other solutions other than bank cards (Fevad 2024).

By offering your customers a variety of payment methods, you enable them to choose the solution that best suits their needs, and avoid frustration (for example, when the payment exceeds their card payment limit).

Good customer follow-ups

In most cases, an abandoned cart is not a definitive defeat. You can follow up with your customers to try to bring them back to their shopping baskets. There are several ways to do this:

• Directly on your site, for example via pop-ups that appear on other pages if the user has forgotten a product in their basket for some time. Not very intrusive, but only works if the customer is still on the site.
• E-mail reminders: this solution requires you to have previously collected your customers' e-mail addresses (with their consent). It's fairly non-intrusive, but your send and open rates may remain fairly low.
• SMS reminders : an intrusive method, but with fairly good open rates. Here again, the numbers must have been collected with the customer's consent (when they create an account on your site, for example).
• Call-backs : only for products with high added value, and which may take a long time to decide to buy. To be avoided as a general rule, as they are very intrusive.

The most important thing is to get the timing and timing of your follow-ups right. Don't be too insistent, but don't let too much time go by before calling the customer back, or you risk losing the sale for good.

Good customer feedback management

The reviews that previous buyers have left on your products are an invaluable source of information for your future customers. A negative review can easily scare off a potential buyer.

Unfortunately, you have no control over the publication of these reviews. However, you can limit their negative impact in two ways:

• By responding to reviews, especially negativeones: dispel any doubts about negative experiences by offering a professional response and demonstrating your willingness to resolve the problem.
• By encouraging your satisfied customers to leave a review: a few negative comments are less problematic if they are accompanied by comments praising your products.

A satisfactory returns policy

Before finalizing their purchase, your customers want to be sure that the item will suit them, which they can't always verify before receipt. Similarly, delivery errors can occur. So it's vital to offer your customers a good returns policy. 54% of buyers, for example, say that free returns and exchanges are the second most important influence in their decision to buy from a brand (source: WalkerSands study). 58% of potential buyers also want to be able to return goods easily, with clear, precise instructions on the website and/or in their parcel.

Think about it this way: a consumer who buys one of your items, isn't satisfied with it, and can't easily return it, will probably never buy from you again. By making it easy for them to return the item, you turn a negative experience into a loyalty-building opportunity. Offering a simple, no-cost returns process shows your customers that their satisfaction is your priority, which reinforces their trust in your brand.

Reverse logistics (or returns management) is therefore an essential part of your e-commerce strategy, and one that can seem complex to manage at first glance. Fortunately, turnkey solutions such as Rakuten Fulfillment Network enable you to outsource these tasks so you can concentrate on what really matters: selling.